Buildkite Pipelines

Run hybrid CI/CD on your own infra with Buildkite. Generates pipeline.yaml steps, dynamic pipeline uploads, agent queues, plugin configs, parallelism with sharding, and blocked-step approvals.

This skill covers Buildkite: writing pipeline.yaml with command, wait, block, group, and trigger steps, dynamically generating pipelines from a bootstrap step, agent queues and meta-data targeting, parallelism with auto-sharding test files, plugins (docker, docker-compose, ecr, junit-annotate), retry strategies (manual/automatic with exit codes), conditional steps with build.branch and pull_request, and using Buildkite's hosted agents vs self-hosted on EC2/K8s.

When to use

Use when building Buildkite pipelines, dynamically generating steps, sharding tests across agents, or migrating from GitHub Actions/CircleCI to Buildkite.

Examples

Dynamic test sharding

Auto-split slow test suite

Generate a Buildkite pipeline that runs my RSpec suite across 8 parallel agents using buildkite-test-engine for auto-balancing, with junit-annotate to surface failures and retry-on-flake

Deploy with approval gate

Block step for prod release

Write a pipeline.yaml that builds, tests, deploys to staging automatically, then has a blocked step requiring approval before the production deploy step runs on the main branch only